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what is happening in the middle east?

Looking at the media, it is very hard to ignore the situation in the middle east. Of course some part of the problem is just magnified by media. Some other part of problem is due to pressure and interference from outside world, particularly west. However, I believe the main problem is the clash between eastern and western philosophy.

Let me open up this issue further. For many years the western society has moved toward the humanistic/materialistic state of mind, where everything is evolving around human and of course nothing exist beyond what we can “see”. Meanwhile, it started to get a huge jump to improve the human life quantities (money, food, life expectancy, etc), of course, mostly ignoring the qualities, particularly after industrialization. However, the eastern culture is mostly based on heavenly school of thoughts, where other things than human matters, yet for improving human life. Despite huge success of east, many years ago, east does not have much success, nowadays. Partly, due to changing the nature of “values”.

As you can see the nature of these two school of thoughts are directly opposing each other. Unfortunately, during last two centuries, not much efforts have been made to settle the differences. This lag in the updating eastern philosophy with the new ideas such as democracy, liberalization, human rights, feminism, etc have led to huge clash as we can see in the middle east.

Just to be clear that, I do not believe that eastern world have to just get the values from the west and institutionalize it. What I believe is that, eastern philosopher should find the meaning of these values within their school of thoughts. As much as this task is postponed the effect of western philosophy on the east is more devastating.

I have found the work by Seyed Hossein Nasr in this direction pretty useful and I suggest everyone, particularly muslims, to read his books.